Subscribe | UPI Odd Newsletter Subscribe Within 40 minutes of the space shuttle crash, 99 percent of the story had already been reported. The craft had broken up over Texas. Debris was strewn across Texas and Louisiana. Communication had been lost shortly before the crash. Mission Control had noticed rising temperatures on the left wing. The shuttle had bobbed away from its flight path and been pulled back by the control system. The crew was dead. The causes were not immediately apparent. Advertisement That was it. No more twists. No sudden revelations. Anyone who had watched CNN for 15 minutes knew what happened. But no one wanted the story to be over. Even when covering a commercial airline disaster -- in which far more than seven people are usually killed -- the press receives a standard instruction from the National Transportation Safety Board that the causes of the crash won't be known for at least eight months. And that's normally accepted as reasonable. Advertisement But when you suddenly have thousands of reporters pulled off other stories and assigned to this one, the idea that there's nothing new to report -- or that we need to wait patiently for the story to emerge -- is untenable. So the press, left with nothing new to say, chose instead to mourn. They eulogized the astronauts. They reported on sermons. They interviewed cowboy-hatted debris-finders in the piney woods of East Texas, never failing to note how "shaken" they were. Prose tends to turn purple at times like this, so there were also non-stories that were turned into stories: 1. The Space Program Will Go On story: No one had suggested that the space program would NOT go on. In fact, the President said in his initial announcement that it would continue. But one after another, everyone from grieving mothers to congressmen to ex-astronauts were confronted with the straw question, so that the voice could be raised into a tremolo, and we could be assured that, yes, there would be more space flights. (There has to be at least ONE more just to retrieve the three guys stranded in the international space station.) 2. The It's Not Terrorism story: The lead story in the Advertisement Sunday New York Times said it's "extremely unlikely that the shuttle had been deliberately struck." Since the shuttle broke up when it was 40 miles above the ground, this is tantamount to saying we can't rule out the possibility that Al Qaeda may have acquired a killer satellite. There were actually dozens of these stories, revealing a level of paranoia that probably brought smiles to the faces of terrorists everywhere. 3. The Another Sept. 11 story: There's no comparison. Sept. 11 was a deliberate criminal act. This was not. Sept. 11 was a genuine breaking story that changed every day, sometimes every hour. This was a tragedy that occurred in an instant. Sept. 11 involved the killing of more than 3,000 civilians. These were trained professionals who were aware of just this kind of risk. 4. The Iraq Effort Will Go On story: This one truly baffles me. Did someone actually suggest that we'll be so grief-stricken that we'll order all the soldiers home and wait until we feel better before confronting Saddam Hussein? 5. The Possible Reasons For the Crash story: I won't bore you with all of them -- faulty tiles, a debris incident during the launch, an aging spacecraft -- but they all amount to: We don't know. Every spokesman says "It's too early to speculate" -- and then is forced to speculate by the sheer mass of assembled media pressure. Advertisement 6. The Cost-Cutting and Management Problems at NASA story: This is the closest to a real story that anyone came up with, except for two problems. The NASA budget had been INCREASED. And the management is brand new. If anything is even slightly out of joint, I'm sure it will be fully revealed by one of the three investigations that are already underway. The official risk estimate of a crash during re-entry is 1 in 350. Those would be unacceptable odds for a commercial airliner or virtually any other form of transportation. But this was not a form of transportation. This was a military and scientific mission for which the odds have to be lower than what civilians should expect. Faced with a lack of new information to report, what occurred during the first 72 hours after the crash can only be described as a sort of gnawing away at the flesh of the original story. There's nothing wrong with that -- unless it elbows breaking news into the background -- but it should be called what it is: a kind of ritual mourning, something the media has increasingly taken upon itself in recent years. The concerned careworn faces of the network anchors are not just window dressing; there would probably be public outrage if they reported the story in the clipped businesslike cadences of, say, Eric Sevareid. The anchors are expected to be civic priests, lowering their heads and softening their voices in invocation, turning the television itself into a memorial service. The front-page story writers are expected to be national poets, like the old Scottish bards who stood on mountaintops during a battle and composed epics that would record events in such a way that the frayed nerves of the living were soothed and reassured. Advertisement Just as a grocer will drape his store in black bunting during a time of national mourning, so our newspapers and electronic outlets now identify with the victims they report on. It's a way of tranquilizing horror and endowing the chatter of the people with a kind of sacredness. In ancient times there were professional mourners, mostly women, who gathered at temples, clapping their hands, singing dirges and lamentations, keening and wailing through the night until a national tragedy was fully digested. There was a time of official depression, and the cries from the temple steps continued until the desire to descend into blackness was slaked. We know from the old rabbis that there were, in fact, three distinct periods of mourning -- the time between death and burial, the seven days following burial, and the 30 days after that. At the conclusion of the third period, there was often a ritual cleansing -- blood for blood. Now the media have become our professional mourners, you'll see their coverage reduce its intensity in more or less the proportions of the ancients. They're searching for the point of cleansing, the place where blood can be spilled and the world can be set right. They'll find it. Advertisement (John Bloom writes a number of columns for UPI and may be contacted at [email protected] or through his Web site at joebobbriggs.com. Snail mail: P.O. Box 2002, Dallas, Texas 75221.)
